Overkill

by Ted Bell

  These soldiers up here are patient, vigilant, and highly trained, and like the men who sit tirelessly and forever waiting deep beneath the earth in missile silos under the Kansas cornfields, they are spoiling for a fight that may never come every single second of every day.

  Beau was well aware of all these facts, thanks to the KGB intel bigwigs back at Falcon’s Lair. He knew what he was getting into. But he was counting on the element of surprise, he was relying on overwhelming firepower, and finally, he was banking on the idea that a lot of tanks rolling up this frozen and forbidden road would be the very last thing the enemy security forces would be expecting.

  And yet here he was. Coming round the mountain when he came! The colonel and his boys were ready! Bring it and bring it hot.

  The gradient was growing ever steeper, with longer stretches of black ice, and the truck’s big diesel engine was showing some strain from the ascent. The purple-black eastern skies were fading up to a faint pink against the panorama of snowcapped mountains. At this altitude, he could see almost all the way to Italy to the south, but—

  Gunfire!

  Coming from emplacements high and low on both sides of the road!

  He accelerated as the commando next to him opened up with the machine gun, firing up at them from the right side. Beau adjusted his lip mike: “Falcon’s Lair, where the hell is my fucking air cover? Jesus Christ, all hell is raining down on us!”

  Joe himself answered, “Beau, first wave is out the door! They should be in the skies above you in approximately three minutes . . . There was some, uh, unexpected trouble here.”

  “What now? Putin, again?”

  “No. One of the high-speed aircraft elevators. Gear jammed. So we only had one.”

  “Christ. Back to work.”

  “Good luck. We need it.”

  “Luck is for losers, Joe. And I ain’t no loser.”

  Now firing his HK out the window with his left hand, he got back on the radio to his drivers. “Caesar and Riviera, this is Colonel Beauregard. The lead vehicles up ahead of you are now coming under heavy attack. Repeat. The convoy is under attack by automatic weapons on both sides of the road. And artillery fire from the higher altitudes. Increase your speed to match my own. We are returning fire using RPGs, which are proving very effective, even against emplacements higher up on the mountainside.

  “Expect Swiss aerial attacks any moment now . . . over. Our air support will be overhead in the next minute or so. I am now proceeding to the Golden Nugget as fast as I can and still stay on this road. Stay with me. When we reach the barricades at the Nugget’s entrance road, we will power right through, unleashing a hail of hell as we go. I wish you all godspeed and good hunting. Golden Nugget, over and out.”

  That’s when the first of the Falcon’s Lair jet fighters appeared out of nowhere. Off to his left, streaking downward at supersonic speeds. It was in a steep dive, right on the tail of and in hot pursuit of a Swiss pilot. The air war for Switzerland had just commenced in earnest.

  Despite his shattered windshield and the dead commando seated to his right, half of his face blown away, and despite the fact that numbers of trucks containing artillery and tanks had been blown off the road, despite the fact that his men were now taking heavy artillery fire from on high in the surrounding mountains, Colonel Beauregard, with his remaining trucks loaded with light artillery and light attack tanks, and his buses loaded with battle-hardened troopers, carried on.

  He would take this fight to the enemy and he would recover all that stolen Russian gold or he would die trying.

  Simple as that.

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Above Falcon’s Lair

  Hawke looked at his watch, willing the red-sweep second hand to slow down. A very serious storm front was heading his way through the mountain passes, as evidenced by the stepped buttresses of black thunderheads towering up darkly to the east. And another bulwark of dark purple cumulus clouds to the west, veined with jagged white lightning.

  The big choppers, en route to the LZ, were bucking and yawing, beset by winds from the cold front that had entered the mountain range.

  And Alex Hawke? Especially here in this violent turbulence, where instant death was just one wind shear away? Stoke never stopped wondering at the sight of the man on the verge of battle. He was hardly the picture of a British lord in his mid-thirties. He was dressed in his Alpine combat whites. He carried a machine pistol and an FN SCAR assault rifle equipped with a grenade launcher mounted on the lower rail. Grenades dangling from his utility belt, yet the man seemed to grow more and more peaceful as the moments until touchdown passed.

  Comfortable, at ease within his surroundings, and at peace with himself. Quietly smoking, staring down at his boots. Only someone like Stokely, who knew the man down to his bones, who had seen him in extreme situations for over a decade, could know what was going on inside.

  Stoke alone, of all the men now flying into the face of danger, knew that behind the little half-smile on his face and the placid exterior, Alex Hawke was after all a creature of radiant violence. Congreve had once told Stoke that their friend was a “masterpiece of contradictions.” Equal parts self-containment, fierce determination, and cocksure animal magnetism. You could see the force of him now on the faces of the eager young men under his command; they seemed drawn to him like water to the moon.

  “Penny for your thoughts, boss,” Stoke said.

  Hawke looked up as if woken from a dream and said, “What? Oh. We need to be over that damn LZ right now, if not sooner.”

  He adjusted his lip mike.

  “How far out, Skipper?” Hawke said to the lead chopper pilot.

  “Seven minutes to the LZ, sir. Trying to make up time. Head wind and wind shear has been killing us up here! Sorry about the ride, sir.”

  “Less than ideal,” Hawke agreed, clenching the overhead grab rail to keep his feet beneath him and wondering about the wisdom of picking this location for the insertion. He could just hear one of his old military tactics professors at the Royal Naval College saying, “In times of peril, try to avoid inserting your troops into locations with names like ‘White Death.’ ”

  Hawke had zero inclination to fight his way through Putin’s defensive perimeters in the middle of an alpine snowstorm. In these raging storms, temperatures could sink to forty below, leading to conditions far worse than the North Pole. The combined effect of cold, wind, and altitude made conditions up here one of the most hostile environments on earth.

  His lads were more than dressed for the occasion. All in white, including U.S. 10th Mountain Division military-issue Polartec cold-weather jackets, Polartec bibs, white Nomex balaclavas, body armor, and boots with crampons at the toe.

  “Stoke,” he said, “how long do you think it’ll take us to get up to the ledge?”

  At midnight, Stoke, Harry Brock, and Thunder and Lightning had come to Hawke with a novel approach to the intended assault on Falcon’s Lair. Instead of descending once they were on the ground and taking on deeply entrenched and heavily armed fighters on the way down, they would do something completely unexpected.

  They would climb up.

  There was another ledge above Das Boot. It was five hundred feet above their location on the snowfield. Wide enough to accommodate a patrol in full Alpine combat regalia.

  “Take the high ground,” Hawke had said, smiling. “Pour our fire down the mountain, from a position right over their heads. God, you guys are good.”

  “Jes doin’ what comes natcherally, bossman,” Chief Charlie Rainwater said.

  “So, Stoke, once we’re on the ground, how long until we’re in position and moving along the ledge, engaging from above?”

  “Weather holds, twenty minutes, max. We got crampons and ice picks, boss. All these boys are climbers since childhood. This ought to be child’s play for them.”

  “Yeah,” Hawke said, thinking, Killing is never child’s play.

  Hawke had just this morning emailed recent Swi
ss recon flight photos to all of his men. Shots of Putin’s fighters digging in roughly a thousand feet above the entrance to Falcon’s Lair at 12,000 feet. The same number of men were now entrenched a thousand feet below the entrance. This in order to ensure against attack from below, or best case, to wage a pincer attack, thus pinning Hawke’s troops from both above and below.

  The stiffest defense he’d encounter, Hawke knew, would occur at the main entrance to the complex. At a place called Das Boot. That was the name early climbers had given to the wide ledge-like formation of protruding ice and rock hanging off the mountainside just above the treacherous Murder Wall. The rocky protrusion, crusted with ice, was so called because it resembled nothing so much as the broad, flat hull of a massive German battleship of the World War II era.

  The outcropping of rock was roughly seventy feet wide and maybe fifty feet deep. It had occurred to Hawke that you could probably land two choppers right at Putin’s front door on the thing! But your odds of survival from the withering fire that would greet you from within the complex made that option somewhat less than ideal . . .

  The tight formation of four Swiss army choppers, each ferrying six commandos, was now arriving at the snowfield. The landing zone was broad, with a soft bosom of snow bisecting it. It was roughly a thousand feet above the entrance to Falcon’s Lair.

  So far he’d seen no visible signs of a resisting force, but he was fairly certain Putin’s forces would mount a do-or-die attempt to keep his men outside of the mountain complex.

  Hawke felt a dip in his stomach as the chopper dropped and dove in over the broad white snow for the soon-to-commence FRIES. Meaning the fast rope insertion extraction system, a technique using a thick braided rope that was first developed by the British in combat during the Falklands War. Fast-roping, as the insertion technique is called, is ideal for deploying troops from helicopters in places where helicopters cannot touch down.

  It’s dangerous, but so what else is new? A guy with heavy equipment is especially challenged. The person descending holds the rope with his specially designed heat-resistant gloves and uses his boots and his legs to control his slide down. The technique is much quicker than rappelling and several people can slide down the same rope simultaneously, but the people on the rope have to stay ten feet apart so that each man has time to get out of the way when he reaches the ground.

  It takes thirty seconds to fast-rope to the ground.

  Hawke was first out the door and first on the rope.

  Almost instantly, heavy automatic fire, sporadic at first, and then concentrated, erupted, aimed in his direction. Hawke hit the ground running and ran toward the sound of gunfire. Training his MP5 at the source of the incoming rounds, he was joined seconds later by Stokely and Harry Brock, who ran up behind him. They were all firing, determined to silence what they believed to be three .50-caliber machine-gun nests hidden inside the snow-laden rocks.

  A round whistled past Hawke’s head and he dove for the ground. The enemy had found their range . . . and another emplacement had erupted fifty yards away, firing at the commandos still fast-roping down from all four hovering choppers. Machine gunners inside the choppers trained their guns on the source of the fire, but it continued.

  “Stoke! Down!” Hawke shouted, ducking for cover. “Form on me! Behind these rocks! Give me cover fire. I’m going to make a run for the boulder over to the right. Get within RPG range and take these bastards out . . .”

  Snow had started to fall up here, and fall hard. This visibility would not last for long.

  As Hawke got to his feet, he saw his lead chopper rise about fifty feet off the ground, carve a deep left turn. This so that the two heavy gunners in the opened starboard door could lay down suppression fire to protect the commandos still fast-roping to the snowy ground. It was instantly effective.

  Soft snow on top of packed ice. It made running tricky, but he sprinted ahead to his objective, still taking incoming fire as he ran out in the open. Ten feet from his objective, he dove for cover, finally rolling to safety behind the looming rocks.

  He swiftly got to his feet and surveyed the scene, and ducked back down again. The offending three-gun emplacement stood between his men and the ledge that was their immediate destination.

  He quickly screwed a rocket-propelled frag grenade onto the modified lower rail of his weapon. It was a long shot, beyond his range, but he’d take it. He couldn’t get any closer to the enemy, so what the hell.

  Sensing the timing of the shooter and sensing that the moment was right, he rose up, located the muzzles of the enemy guns winking in the snow, aimed slightly high to compensate, and pulled the trigger. He waited, three, four, five seconds, thinking he fired too high . . . and then came a concussion-causing blast of sound and the small mushroom cloud rising above the enemy’s gun site.

  “Form up on me!” Hawke shouted at the cadre of commandos racing from the choppers and toward Stoke’s and his position.

  “Stoke,” Hawke said, “cover these guys. Lay down a goddamn barrage with the M60!”

  “My thought exactly, boss!” Stoke said, doing what he did best. The big thumping, whumping gun seemed to have the desired effect. You could feel the booming muzzle in your bones.

  They took heavy fire racing for the ledge, but they gave as good as they got. And most of them made it.

  The battle for Falcon’s Lair was on.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Approach to the Golden Nugget

  Beau looked at the icy road snaking up ahead. Not pretty. Bodies in twisted piles, scattered pools of blood everywhere you looked, burned-out machine-gun emplacements, and piles of grey, rotted snow lay to both sides. Here the road began twisting up to the higher elevations, where it would carve deeply into the side of a mountain.

  And there, where the road made a wide curve continuing to the far side of that mountain, was the fortified entrance of the Golden Nugget.

  Keep your eyes on the prize, Beau, he told himself. He could almost smell that prize now, the brass ring was dangling before his eyes.

  In the skies above, the Falcon’s Lair Squadron, considerably diminished, was doing battle with Swiss air force fighter jets. “An aerial ballet,” Joe said, “with the flashing silver jets of Putin’s forces engaging the red-and-white-marked Swiss F/A-18s.” The only good news here on the Vegas Strip that Beau could see was that the Falcon’s Lair pilot, his squadron, had, until the Swiss fighter jets arrived, softened up the Swiss ground troops and artillery guarding this approach to the Golden Nugget.

  And there, like a great gaping wound in the earth, lay the yawning maw of Bernese Oberland Crevasse. The last great obstacle to be overcome, two deep V-shaped vertical expanses of crumbling rock and ice, monumental buttresses scoured by storms, avalanches, and stone fall. The crevasse plunged a thousand feet down to a churning river, sending up billowing clouds of mist.

  The great iron suspension span across it, one of the notable engineering feats of the early Swiss army engineering corps, had long been a source of civic pride in this region of the Alps. Majestic, soaring, and spanning a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile, the graceful Gletscherspalte Brücke, Crevasse Bridge, has long symbolized man’s mastery over mountains.

  Concentrating the forces of the convoy into one long entity, troops bristling with armament, lethal battle tanks, instead of dividing it into three components had been a stroke of military genius, if Beau did say so himself.

  Had he encountered resistance? Hell, yes. Had he been giving as good as he got? Hell, yes

  In the air, swarms of Swiss fighter jets, the secret hidden air corps, had come screaming out of mountain holes suddenly opening near the tops of the Alps. An eerie sight, seeing a gaping hole appear in a mountain top and then a succession of fighter jets, each one catapulted out of that hole at tremendous speed. And the jets dove deep into picture-postcard valleys that, come summer, would be dotted with red barns and chalets with red geraniums in every window.

  The enemy planes
had been buzzing and diving, strafing them in the early going as they made their way to the target of operations. Amazing to see the picturesque little Alpine villages, with all the quaint charm they could muster, now engulfed in armed warfare.

  A shooting war on the ground, with dogfights in the skies above, the all-out mayhem in this idyllic setting, was an amazing thing to experience, Beau thought, reloading his HK5. Never in my life did I think I’d see anything like this, he thought, never. If I survive this damn battle, I’m going to take all that gold and hole up someplace beautiful but remote, just me and my French niece, Violette. Yeah, and then I’m gonna sit by a pool every damn day and write a book about all this shit. Make a helluva good movie, too!

  It was bizarre, unreal, Beau thought, careening around a corner and over a small bridge, conjuring up once more the Disneyesque aspects of this battle. Waiting in line in the Magic Kingdom at Disney World and all of a sudden you saw the U.S. Marines storming up Main Street USA, engaged in door-to-door combat en route to a Cinderella Castle in flames while screaming fighter jets above took out Space Mountain and the Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house!

  It was getting pretty hot. But when Beau’s gunners, and Tiger tanks, hidden inside tarps on all those big mother flatbed trucks, had opened up with massive machine gun and cannon fire, the tide in the battle had swiftly turned in Beau’s favor.

  And then there was the squadron from Falcon’s Lair. It had been a huge disappointment to both Beau and Uncle Joe. Although the colonel had never expressed his fears about the pilots’ 24/7 operational readiness for aerial combat, the performance was worse than expected. But he’d kept his mouth shut. Especially not saying anything to Putin for fear of further destabilizing the man’s confidence in the entire operation.